(Web­mas­ter com­ment) Why am I repub­lish­ing this post? Because many Africans in Amer­ica think that the slave trade was about Brown peo­ple and never come to the under­stand­ing that it was about the bankers and prof­its. (The same group caus­ing all the hell on earth now!) This accounts for much of the bad blood between the two groups on the part of the brown peo­ple and those who call them­selves white. I must admit it’s a bit harder to under­stand what the psy­chol­ogy is for the (so-​called) white per­son. but there is how ever the fact of prej­u­di­cial treat­ment in favor of the African.

They came as slaves; vast human cargo trans­ported on tall British ships bound for the Amer­i­cas. They were shipped by the hun­dreds of thou­sands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

When­ever they rebelled or even dis­obeyed an order, they were pun­ished in the harsh­est ways. Slave own­ers would hang their human prop­erty by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of pun­ish­ment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the mar­ket­place as a warn­ing to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atroc­i­ties of the African slave trade.

But, are we talk­ing about African slav­ery? King James II and Charles I also led a con­tin­ued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell fur­thered this prac­tice of dehu­man­iz­ing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish pris­on­ers as slaves to the New World. His Procla­ma­tion of 1625 required Irish polit­i­cal pris­on­ers be sent over­seas and sold to Eng­lish set­tlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montser­rat. At that time, 70% of the total pop­u­la­tion of Montser­rat were Irish slaves.

Ire­land quickly became the biggest source of human live­stock for Eng­lish mer­chants. The major­ity of the early slaves to the New World were actu­ally (so-​called) white people.